Phil Jones - Work Without the Worker

Work without the Worker

Work without the Worker

Labour in the Age of
Platform Capitalism

Phil Jones

First published by Verso 2021

Phil Jones 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-043-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-045-1 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-046-0 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Isa

Contents

We live in an age of technological wonder. Today, machines beat humans at chess, write pop songs and drive cars of their own volition. Automated stores allow customers to choose their shopping and walk out without using a checkout. Through tiny chips planted in the brain, machines are apparently learning to read our minds. This silicon arcadia promises to cure our poisoned planet and take us to Mars, to realise eternal life and raise humans out of dull toil to the state of the divine. It is a world of abundance and smart solutions, where convenience is only matched by luxury.

It is also a world of dubious basis, where the apparently inexorable thrust of scientific progress is merely the dream of a few tech tycoons. Dystopia, ever the bad conscience of utopia, troubles this fantasy of cybernetic harmony, which beneath its glittering surface relies on increased oppression, surveillance and atomization. Each world-historical event, whether it be financial crash or pandemic, only seems to accelerate our drift toward its centre a no-touch future where, encouraged to avoid others, we stay in our homes, which are no longer just personal spaces but our offices, shopping centres, gyms, doctors and entertainment venues. An internet of things winds its way through our sleep, meetings and heart rates, and reports each phenomenon as data, later fed back into our lives as optimised services, all provided by one platform or another. Outside of the home, the smart city offers only greater surveillance, where the dispossessed live out their days as risk profiles to be policed by bio-metric and facial recognition technologies. A weave of algorithms wraps all bodies, spaces and institutions in a web of machinic perception, so tightly that forms of computational intelligence become quotidian to the point of invisibility. Through this imperceptible matrix of sensors, trackers and cameras, capital gains access to new materialities of code and cognition. From meteorology to biometrics, the microscopic to the cosmic, ever more life falls under the thrall of exchange. Data is transfigured into all manner of alien machines: autonomous vehicles replace taxi and truck drivers, algorithms supplant the authority of managers and diagnose cancer with accuracy greater than any doctor.

Yet, this automated dreamworld is more fantasy than reality. Behind the search engines, apps and smart devices stand workers, often those banished to the margins of our global system, who for lack of other options are forced to clean data and oversee algorithms for little more than a few cents. The feeds of Facebook and Twitter may seem to wipe away violent content with automated precision, but decisions about what constitutes pornography or hate speech are not made by algorithms. A facial recognition camera seems, of its own volition, to spot a face in a crowd, an autonomous truck to drive without human involvement. But in reality, the magic of machine learning is the grind of data labelling. Behind the cargo cult rituals of Silicon Valley is the gruelling labour of sifting hate speech, annotating images and showing algorithms how to spot a cat.

This book argues that these badly paid, psychically damaging tasks not algorithms are primarily what make our digital lives legible. Think of it as microwork, so for a penny you might pay for someone to tell you if there is a human in a photo, Jeff Bezos informed the world at the public opening of Amazon Mechanical Turk, the first and still most famous of these sites. On such sites, tasks like tagging a human in an image to train artificial intelligence last for all of a minute. Even longer jobs tend to last no more than an hour. Microwork sites allow contractors to decompose larger projects into radically short pieces of work. Contractors post these human intelligence tasks (HITs) to the site, which appear on the screens of thousands of workers or Turkers, as they are known who jostle to complete the tasks on a piece by piece basis. From each transaction the platform takes a 20 per cent cut. The work is carried out remotely and workers never encounter each other except as digital avatars on online forums.

A prototype for twenty-first-century work that is as empowering for capital as it is paralysing for workers, Mechanical Turk has now been emulated by competitors such as Appen, Scale and Clickworker, offering the same heady mix of clean data and cheap labour to contractors ranging from academics to capitals great modern agents Facebook and Google. As brokers of labour arbitrage, these sites locate what Mike Davis describes as surplus humanity sections of the global populace rendered outside of the economy proper to sporadically fulfil the needs of big tech.

The brutal tectonics of platform capital are reshaping the already desolate global landscape of labour into a grey hinterland of casual and petty employment. But to read much of the literature on microwork, one would think such data work is an entirely novel phenomenon. Confident assertions of the human cloud, humans-as-a-service and just-in-time-labour, suggest a tigers leap from the workaday world of yesteryear into a brave new future of machine-human hybridity. If this book has one aim it is to convince the reader that microwork truly represents not the phoenix of the South but a further twist in our planetary crisis of work. Microwork is the sum of the same processes of sluggish growth, proletarianization and declining labour demand that have ballooned the informal sectors of countries such as India, Venezuela and Kenya. As we will see in the first chapter, the rising numbers on these sites are not a story of capitalist success, but a tragic chronicle of the rising numbers unable to find work in formal labour markets. They are often those housed in prisons, camps and slums, the totally jobless or underemployed a sorry reminder of surplus humanity.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the number of people on these sites has boomed in the long interregnum between the crash of 2008 and the present. Though no precise figures exist for how many workers undertake microwork globally, estimates now place the number at around 20 million, a large proportion of which reside in the Global South, in South America, East Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

Judging by the numbers individual platforms claim to host, the numbers working on these sites may well be much higher than current estimations suggest. In the last decade, Clickworker alone has grown to over 2 million users, while even smaller sites like Appen now host over a million. If the workers using these platforms were classed as employees, the contracting firms would rank among the largest employers in the world today, behind only a few governments and Walmart. Somewhat staggeringly, the Chinese crowdwork platform Zhubajie boasts over 12 million users, which would make it the largest contractor of labour the world over.